To me, the analytics movement's main goal is to find out truths about their respective sports, regardless of the level of depth of that truth into the culture of that sport.

Eliminating a bit of knowledge about a sport that seems basic and obvious simply points people who understand sports in a mathematical way towards something else which might be worth researching.

I don't think analytics people have found the holy grail by quantifying sports, but alot of coaches and executives with 'traditional' knowledge don't have things figured out completely either.

The issue isn't analyitics supplanting traditional knowledge, but analytics building upon traditional knowledge. To me, the reason why advanced stats have gotten a bad rap is that they aren't... tried and true and very few of them have any context to people who aren't in the know.

It isn't that RBI's or HR or BA aren't significant or meaningful or putting in a lefty to go against a righty is now flying in the face of baseball truths, it's that those qualities on their own aren't as important to the goal of winning a game as they were originally believed to be.

In the end, a team of executives and managers and also a manager and players have to pull from a body of knowledge to reach that team's collective goals. Using analytics can give a team another portal into the understanding the complexity of the game.

Billy Beane used advanced stats to influence his decisions, but he also had over twenty years of knowledge knowing the game in a traditional sense. He simply used analytics to supplement or inform his decision making process.

<--- Me when my head hits the pillow